Where to Now?

In this book I have tried to resurrect the analytic centrality of middle classes in development theory while also rescuing a focus on history and domestic politics in the study of late industrialization. With evidence drawn from four late-developing countries, combined with analysis of several “early” developers, I have offered an argument that travels in time and across regions. My claim is that successful economic development depends on a confluence of state and societal capacities to discipline capitalists in a spatial context where such actions can reinforce strong forward and backward linkages between industrial and agricultural sectors of the economy. Rural middle classes have been key actors in achieving these aims, particularly when they are embedded in the state or other equivalent institutions with coercive or policy-making power. In seeking to account for the conditions that made this likely, I identified a variety of historical factors – including legacies of urbanization and militarization, patterns of middle-class formation, processes of state formation, and ethnicity as well as the cultural practices and national politics sustaining the sway of these actors, identities, processes, and institutions – that together determined the likelihood that disciplining of capitalists occurred and sustained economic development resulted. In this sense, historical contingency and path dependency are considered as central to developmental successes as any rational bureaucratic commitment to finding the “proper” macroeconomic policy techniques and prescriptions.